SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 11/15/2010 -- NVIDIA announced today that, for the first time ever, enterprises and start-ups will be able to access the supercomputing-class performance of NVIDIA® Tesla GPUs through a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, called Cluster GPU Instances. This new offering extends the available options for flexible, on-demand high performance computing (HPC) within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Supercomputing has become an important tool in the process of creating commercial products, from design and simulation-based testing to production. However, the upfront cost of acquiring these systems has, until recently, limited their use to government and university-based research facilities or businesses willing to make the large up-front capital investment. By making GPUs available through Amazon EC2, AWS is now making this available to businesses of all sizes.

"With Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, our customers now have the power of high performance computing, the efficiency and speed of GPUs and the highly available, scalable and affordable cloud environment our customers have come to expect from AWS," said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. "We're excited to help our customers access the raw power of GPU technology and look forward to the innovation this will enable."

"The ability to run a larger number of more detailed simulations, with an on-demand pricing model and the scalability of Amazon EC2, enables companies to build better, safer, more reliable products," said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. "GPU supercomputing, through AWS, gives users a flexible computing facility that allows them to scale their computing needs based on user demand."

Hundreds of applications have already been ported to the NVIDIA® CUDA massively parallel architecture upon which all its current GPUs are based. CUDA-accelerated applications benefit from being able to access the hundreds of cores in a GPU to run, in some cases, orders of magnitude faster than on conventional processors. Some of the applications ready to be used on Amazon Cluster GPU Instances include mental images' RealityServer® (interactive photo-realistic rendering) and Mathworks' MATLAB (leading technical computing software).

To learn more about Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, go here, and for more information on NVIDIA Tesla high performance GPU computing products, go here.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,600 U.S. patents, including ones covering designs and insights which are essential to modern computing. For more information, see http://www.nvidia.com.